Regional climate projections using a deep-learning–based model-ranking and downscaling framework: application to European climate zones

Accurate regional climate projection calls for high-resolution downscaling of Global Climate Models (GCMs). This work presents a deep-learning-based multi-model evaluation and downscaling framework ranking 32 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models using a Deep Learning-TOPSIS (DL-TOPSIS) mechanism and refines outputs using advanced deep-learning models. Using nine performance criteria, five Köppen-Geiger climate zones-Tropical, Arid, Temperate, Continental, and Polar-are investigated over four seasons. While TaiESM1 and CMCC-CM2-SR5 show notable biases, ranking results show that NorESM2-LM, GISS-E2-1-G, and HadGEM3-GC31-LL outperform other models. Four models contribute to downscaling the top-ranked GCMs to 0.1 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mmultiscripts><mml:mrow></mml:mrow> <mml:mrow></mml:mrow> <mml:mo>∘</mml:mo></mml:mmultiscripts> </mml:math> resolution (Vision Transformer (ViT), Geospatial Spatiotemporal Transformer with Attention and Imbalance-Aware Network (GeoSTANet), CNN-LSTM, CNN-Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM)). Effectively capturing temperature extremes (TXx, TNn), GeoSTANet achieves the highest accuracy (Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) = 1.57 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mmultiscripts><mml:mrow></mml:mrow> <mml:mrow></mml:mrow> <mml:mo>∘</mml:mo></mml:mmultiscripts> </mml:math> C, Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) = 0.89, Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) = 0.85, Correlation (r) = 0.92), so reducing RMSE by 20% over ConvLSTM. CNN-LSTM and ConvLSTM do well in Continental and Temperate zones; ViT finds fine-scale temperature fluctuations difficult. These results confirm that multi-criteria ranking improves GCM selection for regional climate studies and transformer-based downscaling exceeds conventional deep-learning methods. This framework offers a scalable method to enhance high-resolution climate projections, benefiting impact assessments and adaptation plans. The present study has the following limitations, which will be addressed in future works: (i) temperature-only focus, (ii) unquantified scenario uncertainty, and (iii) higher computational cost of transformer models.